Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

"An explosive mixture of dread, greed and corruption. You won't put it down until you've read the very last page."—Cosmopolitan

This tightly plotted novel by Brazil's best-selling crime author is a tale of drug dealing gone wrong, police corruption, and macabre blackmail, set in a heat-soaked town in the vast untamed Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday, alone on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack and pockets it along with the pilot's expensive watch. Thus begins the protagonist's long slide into corruption.

When police locate the crash site, the pilot's body is missing and a large-scale search ensues. Our hero, now involved in a busted cocaine deal, ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. When the family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son, our hero, who does not have the pilot's body, decides someone else's will do. . . . Or so he thinks.

Patricia Melo is an author and playwright born in Sao Paolo (1962). Her novels Lost World, The Killer, In Praise of Lies, and Inferno have been published in English to rave reviews. Her works have also been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Dutch.

Review

'An explosive mixture of dread, greed and corruption. You wont put it down until youve read the very last page.'--Cosmopolitan Brazil

Praise for Patricia Melo:

Melo (The Killer and In Praise of Lies) is a promising literary crime novelist, one of a new crop of Brazilian suspense writers that includes Rubem Fonseca. Melo keeps the tale oscillating between morbid intrigue and hilarity, deftly skewering the publishing industry in the process PW

The jolts that this Brazilian thriller delivers (The Killer) come not from the repeated instances of gore but from Maiquel's recurrent longing for basic human needs--love, salvation, a spiffy pair of shoes. New Yorker

Brazilian screenwriter and playwright Melo has combined the anomie of Quentin Tarantino and her country's landscape to create a highly readable study of a killer for hire. Library Journal

'Casually brutal and utterly uncompromising, Lost World is nerve-shreddingly compelling from start to grizzly finish .”-- Observer

Very, very dark, Lost World is grimly compelling and superbly atmospheric read' Guardian

Synopsis

Synopsis

A dead pilot and a kilo of cocaine are found by our hero in the wreck of a small plane. Pressured by a Bolivian drug gang our man agrees to give up the body of the pilot to his family for serious money. Only he doesn't have the body so someone elses will have to do. Or so he thinks.

About the Author

Patricia Melo: Patricia Melo is an author and playwright born in Sao Paolo (1962) but now sharing her time between Brazil and in Switzerland. Her novels Lost World, The Killer, In Praise of Lies and Inferno have been published in English to rave reviews.